Thursday, September 12, 2013

Before she moved to Maryland, I was privileged to be part of a writers' group with her in Minneapolis,
and say without reservation that her comments and suggestions
helped to improve our Detective Kubu novels.

Sujata is the quintessential cosmopolitan! She was born in England to parents from India and
Germany. She grew up mostly in the United States (California, Pennsylvania and
Minnesota) and earned her BA from the Johns Hopkins University's Writing
Seminars program. After that she worked as a reporter at the Baltimore Evening
Sun newspaper before marrying and moving to Japan. The area where Sujata once
lived, an hour south of Tokyo, forms most of the settings of her Rei Shimura
mysteries. The series has collected many mystery-award nominations, including
the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards, and has won the Agatha and
Macavity prizes for traditional mystery fiction. The Rei Shimura mysteries are
published in 18 countries. The first book in the series is THE SALARYMAN'S WIFE and the tenth is SHIMURA TROUBLE.

Now Sujata has turned to India as the setting of her new novel, THE SLEEPING DICTIONARY. In a well-deserved starred review, Booklist had this to say about this enchanting book:

“Trapped by her past and uncertain of her future, the peasant girl
Kamala’s journey toward independence—personal and political—unfolds in
this riveting historical novel. The award-winning author of the Rei
Shimura mysteries turns to 1930s–40s India,with the British in control
of the colony as Gandhi and others fight for freedom. The setting gives
new life to the familiar story of an orphan girl struggling to make her
way in a cruel world. Clever Kamala is front and center throughout, as
Massey builds her coming-of-age tale around India as it moves toward
independence, effectively combining personal narrative with the grandeur
of a sweeping historical epic. The characters are easily categorized,
but deft storytelling prevents them from being predictable. The book is
also notable for its detail-driven depiction of the limitations imposed
by caste and colonization. The Sleeping Dictionary, an utterly
engrossing tale of love, espionage, betrayal, and survival, is
historical fiction at its best, accessible to all audiences."

Please welcome my good friend, Sujata Massey.

Stan - Thursday

_______________________________________

He was the kind of man who disagreed with his
government—and sought to reform its operations. He broke laws to spread his
messages of unrest and felt forced to flee, lest he spend the rest of his life
in prison.

In search of shelter,
the radical traveled undercover to countries that were unfriendly with his
own. But the path was complicated, as he could not
use his passport. The travel papers he hoped that other governments might
produce for him weren't forthcoming. And then, when it seemed like he’d settled
into a powerless rut, the fugitive traveler popped up on another continent, in
the heart of a nation willing to help him wage war on his homeland.

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden?
Sorry, but that’s not the guy I am writing about.

Snowden was preceded
72 years ago by Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian freedom fighter who outfoxed the
British government of India and made it possible for a hostile army to invade
his homeland. Which should make everyone think twice about what Edward Snowden
can still accomplish.

Subhas Chandra Bose

Mr. Bose’s adventure
began in 1897, when he was born in British India as the younger son of a
wealthy upper-caste Hindu lawyer. Although he attended elite, English-medium
schools in Calcutta and was tracking toward a conventional career in civil
service or law, he witnessed enough discrimination to change his plan about
working for the rulers of his country. The young Subhas joined Bengali
political activists and rose from being a mere independence supporter to a
position as an activist mayor of Calcutta. After serving a long political
imprisonment and then banishment by the British government of India, he was
permitted back into India in the late 1930s and promptly resumed his
independence activities as president of the All-India Congress Party, and after
that, his own new political party, the Forward Bloc.

Bose, who was now
admiringly called “Netaji,” or ‘honored leader,’ was enthusiastically received.
Much of the population was upset at being commanded by the British to serve
them in World War II when there was still no promise of a date that India might
get self-rule. While the most famous independence activist of the time, Mahatma Gandhi, counseled Indians to be patient, Netaji demanded unconditional freedom and told his followers that
violence against the British might be necessary.

The
threat of Netaji disrupting war supply production was too much for India’s
government. In autumn of 1940, Calcutta police arrested Mr. Bose on charges of
plotting to deface the Holwell Monument, a proud symbol of British colonialism
in Dalhousie Square. The activist had not actually laid a hand on the monument,
but he was locked up under India’s War Rules, a measure that greatly expanded
police rights to detainment. Mr. Bose felt his incarceration was unjust and
undertook a hunger strike, weakening himself so much that the British were
forced to bring him out of jail and into a hospital.

Mr.
Bose — who’d suffered respiratory problems since catching
tuberculosis during a two-year-long imprisonment in Mandalay in the 1920s —
stayed dangerously weak. His doctors proclaimed him too ill to stand trial,
advising rest and recuperation at his parents’ house. The police reluctantly
agreed, stationing constables to watch the family’s handsome bungalow on Elgin
Road. But their round-the-clock presence wasn’t enough to defeat the clever
politico who, while resting in a curtained bedchamber, grew a shaggy beard and
hatched an escape plan with his nephew. On the evening of January 16, 1941, the
nephew drove away from the house with what appeared to be a Muslim
acquaintance, heavily bearded and dressed in the attire of the Northwest
Frontier Provinces. Many days later, the house servants discovered one of the
meals they’d been leaving next to Netaji’s curtained bedside hadn’t been eaten,
and the alarm was raised.

The family house - now a museum

Subhas Chandra Bose
had a sizeable head start on the police and, with the assistance of relatives
and political supporters, traveled north by car and train through the Northwest
Frontier Provinces that are now part of Pakistan. He posed as a deaf-mute, his
presence explained at any checkpoints by two Pashto-speaking companions (one of
whom—unknown to Mr. Bose--was a double agent informing on him for both the
U.S.S.R. and Britain). The runaway reached Kabul and took shelter within a
sympathizer’s home.

Like Edward Snowden,
Netaji could not travel out of Kabul using his own passport; he’d made a bet
that the Soviet consul would give him travel papers, but this assumption proved
wrong. Bose’s helpers spent two more months trolling various consulates before
Italy granted him travel papers allowing him to travel under the name Count
Orlando Mazzotta.

Following advice from
their double agent, the British assumed Mr. Bose would go to Turkey, and sent
assassins to wait along the border there. But he avoided that route. Using a
combination of car, donkey, horse and his own feet, he was guided out of
Afghanistan and across mountains to the Soviet border, where his Italian papers
allowed him into the country that had shunned him months earlier. Once on Red
soil, he declared his true identity, but instead of getting a warm welcome, he
was offered the services of the German ambassador, who put him on a plane to
Berlin.

In the 1930s, Netaji
had written disapprovingly of Nazi polices, although he admired the structure
of their government, and socialism. Now he was facing a life-changing choice,
just as Snowden had when he decided to get help from China and Russia.

A popular saying at
the time, among militant Indian freedom fighters, was “the enemy of my enemy is
my friend.” Perhaps Netaji followed that reasoning when he decided to take the
flight to Germany. And at first, it waswunderbar.His
German hosts provided equipment for him to broadcast political addresses
against the British. But almost two years passed, and Hitler still hadn’t
signed his statement of India’s right to self-government. During this time Mr.
Bose had also married an Austrian woman and fathered a daughter, but he had
begun to question his future. And the Germans may have had their doubts too,
about providing endless support to an undesirable racial type.

In 1943,
the Nazis offered Bose a one-way trip out on a submarine, transferring him to a
Japanese submarine near the Cape of Good Hope. It was in Tokyo that received
the kind of support he’d longed for. Senior officers in the Imperial Army
agreed that India should be freed from British colonial power. Together with
Bose, they drew up a plan for a military force of expatriate Indians to seize
their country from the British.

Japanese submariners who picked up Bose from a German submarine

The idea of an Indian
National Army built from tens of thousands of captured Indian prisoners of war
was something the Japanese had been thinking about since beginning their
conquest of South East Asia. Their officers took care to treat their captured
Indian POWs well and invited them to join a volunteer Indian National Army
(I.N.A.) headed by Mohan Singh, a former Indian Army officer. However this
first I.N.A disbanded after less than a year because few POWs were willing to
desert their troops. But once Netaji arrived in Southeast Asia, and word spread
that he would be the I.N.A.’s chief, their minds were easily changed. Over
40,000 Indians joined; not just POWs but ethnic Indian civilians living in
Southeast Asia, including young women who would serve as combat soldiers and
medics in a woman-commanded regiment. Supreme Commander Bose ordered the men
and women to train together. He insisted that everyone to speak Hindi, erasing
regional and religious boundaries. Seasoned Indian Army officers and senior enlisted
men became his top officers, and they drew up strategies for entering and
taking India.

But by 1944, Japan
was dragging its feet. The war in the Pacific was turning, since the Americans
had joined the British. Japan was running low on weapons, food, uniforms and
boots - with nothing to restock. It wasn’t easy to give the I.N.A. the supplies
it needed to mount a successful invasion. Finally, though, Netaji’s troops were
given the all clear to invade along with the Japanese. They entered
northeastern India and easily took the town of Moirang in Manipur, and after
that laid sieges against the British-led Indian Army strongholds of Imphal and
Kohima that lasted almost four months. In the end the Indian Army prevailed,
and the Japanese and I.N.A, retreated back to Burma, many perishing along the
way from injuries, starvation and exhaustion, while the survivors were captured
as POWs by the Indian Army and Allies.

Surrendered Indian National Army troops at Mount Popa

The dream finally
imploded after the US atom-bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Japan
to surrender. On August 18, 1945, Netaji boarded a Japanese military plane with
Japanese and a few Indian officers, hoping for yet another ride to a safe
haven. But the overloaded aircraft crashed over Taiwan, hitting the ground hard
and erupting in flames.

According to the
British Indian government — which received reports from the Taiwanese
hospital —Mr. Bose died from severe burns within hours of the crash. Netaji’s
surviving companion on the flight vouches for this story. But because Mr.
Bose’s body was never seen, most Indians didn’t believe it. Some suspected he
was captured by the Soviets who, angered by his alliance with Germany and
Japan, sent him to a gulag. Another theory was that he disguised himself as a
monk in the Himalayas — trekking down to attend the 1964 funeral of
Jawaharlal Nehru. Such is the power of a vanished man on a country’s psyche.

India’s situation
changed rapidly after World War II. Sympathy for surviving I.N.A. veterans
inspired civilians and even many Indian Army soldiers and policemen to contribute
cash toward their rehabilitation. When the British government announced the
plan to prosecute several I.N.A. officers for treason or war crimes, riots
flared nationwide. The unrest the government had always feared Mr. Bose might
be able to instigate was happening. They could no longer count on Indians in
their employ to support their rule —a
major part of their decision to finally quit India in 1947.

Today, there are
garland-draped statues of Netaji in most Indian towns, and the airport in Kolkata
is named in his honor. Quite a few people around the world think that Mr.
Snowden deserves the same kind of recognition for his stance against covert
intelligence-gathering. But because of modern technology, he doesn’t need a
world power or terrorist group to provide guns and uniforms for him. To inspire
action by followers, all he needs is to fire up his laptop and send out a
webcast. Or simply tweet.

4 comments:

Welcome, Sujata. Thank you for a bit of history (among many bits) of which I was seriously uninformed. So many lessons in it. Not the least of which is that geopolitical maneuverings always involve strange bedfellows...not meant to be, but you may take is as, a plug for your dynamite cover for "The Sleeping Dictionary."

I don't think that Edward Snowden has such militant goals nor is he leading an "anti-colonial" fight.

He's a smart guy who while working at his job became conscious of the thoroughgoing surveillance of the NSA upon the U.S. population and was appalled by it and wanted to inform the U.S. population of its extent. He is a whistleblower, or a muckraker.

He's hardly a political leader. Nor does he aspire to be one. He sees himself as a truth teller.

It seems the U.S. population is quite opposed to the invasion of privacy Snowden has uncovered, in fact, the majority.

And, as far as the Nazis using "socialist" in their name, this was a manipulative, cynical, propagandistic ploy. In the early 1930s, due to the Depression, there was massive unemployment and poverty in Germany. Political protest was constant by all types of organizations, including Socialists.

The Nazis capitalized on this and used this word in their name, but what they did and propagated is as much like Socialism as a fish is like a bicycle.

In U.S. history Socialists were very much a part of the anti-segregationist and racist policies of Jim Crow, wholeheartedly joined in the Civil Rights Movement. They have opposed anti-Semitism and all types of bigotry.

Many were targets of the KKK when they actively opposed Jim Crow in the South, defended the Scottsboro defendants in the 1930s and joined anti-racist campaigns.